This topic of good old days peep into our life quite often. There is no 2nd thought about old days being good by any one. Everything was nice back then. People used to earn less, but they were more happy. People use to work in strict office hours, they had more time to spend with family. One such common topic which triggers every discussion of good old days is TV.
During our childhood days, TV was more of a luxury. Not everyone had TV at home. Not every felt TV was a necessity. Not everyone wanted to spend their fortune for TV. TV was not a must device at home then. For NEWS people sorted to radio or newspaper then. Paper & Radio were more affordable then TV. In the entire street there were countable number of houses who had TV. 1st Women Prime Minister of India, Late. Indira Gandhi mentioned to Indians "Khone Khone par TV Rakho", which meant, keep TV in every room.
The revolution of TV at home concept was brought when Ramanand Sagar Arts productions started telecasting Ramayana, a great Indian Epic. That's when almost everyone (parents of our generation) started thinking on buying a TV. As & when Ramayana series started progressing, more & more people bought TV. Still not everyone could afford a TV. TV per street increased from 2 houses per street to like 5 houses per street. Sunday morning 9 AM Was the telecast time for Ramayana. People flocked into the houses which had TV. It was a look forward to event. People would get up early in the morning, take bath, have breakfast & be ready to watch Ramayana. Initially in 1 hour telecast time for Ramayana, the total telecast time was atleast for 45 mins. Later, more & more time was allocated to Ads more than the actual episode. Still people had all their patience tied up to sit for an hour to watch the ads too which would take up more time than actual Ramayana itself. People who played the roles of Rama, Sita & Lakshmana were actually considered as Gods. Not everyone understood that people are playing the roles, there were people who also thought, they were actually Gods.
After a while after concluding Ramayana, Chopra productions started the next Indian epic Mahabharata. This is when the number of people buying the Tv slowly started to increase. No doubt, buying the TV revolution was definitely brought in by Ramayana. But slowly people started realizing the importance of TV as days progressed. Areas which had 1 or 2 TV antennas peeping out started to look gorgeous with more antennas covering the area.
As the time progressed, every one who had TV at home were becoming a RF engineer. As soon as the signal went bad, people would get on to roof tops or terrace & start rotating the antenna all directions possible :) Antenna would rotate 360 degrees & come back to the same position searching for better signal. People would stand in series & start communicating from inside to outside to terrace. "Yeah, we can see it little better now. It is not clear, rotate more, it is fine now, hey it was just fine, take it back to the old position." These were the common discussions that could be heard. Wow, what a team of RF engineers were at home.
Things were little more different in villages as I hear. In villages or rural areas as we say, people had to travel distances to watch those Indian epics being telecasted. One or 2 houses would have TV in the entire town & people walked distances to watch those serials. Also, since the signal coverage was generally bad, they could hardly see anything properly. In their own words "TV would be full of dots & shades. We had to search for the pictures/images in between those dots." So was the situation there. Added to this, when everyone just settled down in front of the TV to search those images between those dots, power would go OFF. Phat.....There would be power cut... They would still wait for 1 hour & curse the power cut... They had the enthu to wait for 1 hour sitting in front of the TV screen waiting eagerly for the power to come back.
Other than these two, other commonly watched things included Chitrahaar on wednesday evening, Sunday afternoon award movie (all the more happier when it is of the local/regional lang), Rangoli on Sunday morning apart from few local/regional serials & movies that was being telecasted. Only channel we had then was Doordharshan...
Time has changed now. Almost everyone even in the rural area has TV with cable connection or Dish TV. Lot of families in urban areas have so called BIG TV. Service providers are competing hard to have their brand sold with more & more channels added onto them. We also sit in front scanning through the channels. In a time span of X mins/hours spent in front of the TV, all the x mins/hours would go usually in scanning through the channels in most of the cases & finally mentioning, nothing good is running in the TV!!!!!
With the change in time & technology, will we be able to see the good olds days of people flocking at a single place & waiting eagerly to watch a serial being telecasted only once a week?
